Lions and tigers and arab rulers

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Consider the following evidence, as we assemble this week’s zeitgeist, item by item:

1. Moammar Gadhafi: It’s been a bad year for jihadists and despots: Mubarak, bin Laden and now the terrorist clown (or is that clown terrorist?) gets his.

2. Bicoastal bliss: The feds launch a lot of boats with $35 billion. Stephen Harper could get elected king this morning, at least in Vancouver and Halifax, where the ship-building industries are enjoying an instant revival. We’s the bys what build the boats. Buy Canadian, eh?

3. Shark-fin ban: Toronto city council votes Monday on a motion to ban the sale of shark fins and shark-fin soup. Did you know that 73 million sharks a year are killed for their fins and that some species have been reduced by 90 per cent? Save the sharks! Switch to tomato bisque!

4. Chinese toddler: A poor little two-year-old girl was run over – twice – by some jerks, and more than a dozen people walked around her as she lay screaming for nearly 10 minutes. It’s causing a lot of hand-wringing in China. Let’s just hope that when they stop wringing, they actually start helping people who need a hand.

5. Jungle book: The other unhappy story everyone’s talking about is the guy who let all his lions and tigers loose in Ohio and then killed himself. It turned into a bad day for the whole menagerie as state deputies turned into big-game hunters, and now most of the lions, tigers and, oh my, bears are dead. At last report, there was one lone monkey out there. My advice: don’t monkey around. Get out of Ohio.

6. Torture enablers are people too: George W. Bush comes to Metro Vancouver Friday, and the Occupy people want him arrested for war crimes. Hail (and rocks and rotten tomatoes) to the Chief.

7. True blue: Steven Slater, the guy who escaped from his job as a Jet Blue flight attendant – literally – down the emergency chute, avoids hard time. But has to pay the airline back for damaging their chute: $831.25 bucks a month. And he thought life was tedious before. But then there’s the book tour to look forward to.

8. BieberWatch: Justin Bieber’s tour stops in Peru, the home of his doppelganger, Alejandro Avilez Kamp, the Peruvian Justin Bieber. Geez, there are two of them.